Over the course of their career, EPs were often where my bloody valentine mapped out the path ahead. This is where their sense of sonic exploration and bold experimentation first came into being. Frontman Kevin Shields says the band approached EPs in the same way that they did full albums. There was never a sense of a lead single with a couple of B-sides. “Basically, they’re just other songs that work in different contexts,” Shields tells Apple Music. “It’s a bit like the way The Beatles used to have ‘Strawberry Fields’ with ‘Penny Lane’. It’s not a B-side ’cause it’s worse, it’s just another way of putting music out.” Shields recalls being inspired by Nick Cave’s group The Birthday Party as to how effective the EP could be as an art form. “They had these two EPs, Mutiny! and The Bad Seed, that came back-to-back,” he says. “I remember they were really super strong and were just as impactful as the albums. That was a big influence on me.” Collecting four game-changing EPs—1988’s You Made Me Realise and Feed Me With Your Kiss, 1990’s Glider and 1991’s Tremolo—alongside some of the group’s most treasured deep cuts (“instrumental no. 1”, “instrumental no. 2”, “glider [full length version]” and “sugar”) and three tracks that remained unreleased until 2012 (“angel”, “good for you” and “how do you do it”), ep’s 1988-1991 and rare tracks makes for an immersive, fascinating collection. Kevin Shields talks us through some of the set’s key moments. you made me realise “It was something we did very quickly. The attitude to doing it was we wanted it to sound like it was coming out of a small PA system that was turned up way too loud. Creating something different isn’t such a big deal, it’s doing something exciting. That’s the feeling you have, and then somehow it carries into the music and the people listening to it feel it too.” slow “‘slow’ was the first time I started using the tremolo on the guitar. A friend of mine heard we had five days in the studio and he lent me his Fender Jazzmaster. The Jazzmaster had a tremolo on and I’d never used one before. I tried it with the effect of reverse reverb, and then I got this idea of turning the tone down and using the tremolo with it. I started using it and was like, 'Oh my god, this is so cool.' And suddenly, something inside me connected to my hands. It was just like magic. I was just joined together with it and it was just perfect.” instrumental no. 2 “We started using samplers—they weren’t proper samplers, they were roll and delay units that basically had sampling ability. I wanted to try out the idea of looping something and doing some music over it. At the time, I was in love with Public Enemy’s second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and I just thought, ‘Fuck it, we’ll sample Public Enemy.’ I did this guitar thing over it. At the time, ‘acid house’ was a buzzword, and when we did ‘instrumental no. 2’ I was kind of like, ‘This is the future of it.’ Then trip-hop happened. Madonna did the song ‘Justify My Love’, which sounds like she heard it.” off your face “The real name of the song was ‘Hate Off Your Face’, but I took the word ‘Hate’ out. It was Bilinda [Butcher, vocalist and guitarist]’s song, but I always worked with the titles. It’s one regret that I have that I suggested we use ‘off your face’ instead; I think it steered people away from what the lyrics were about. One weird thing about the song is if you listen carefully at the end, it sounds like a pack of hounds howling. I had this elaborate backing-vocal idea, which I did too during the whole outro of the song. I did about five tracks of vocal harmonies, and I did all this vocal thing. And then at the end I was like, ‘No, it's no good.’ But as a joke, I stuck it through a harmonizer effect that basically turned it all out of tune. And so it just sounded like a lot of dogs, but all the dogs are me.” sugar “‘sugar’ was done in January of ’89, only about four months after we finished Isn’t Anything. I was asked to make a track for a flexi disc. It was going to be an old track, and I was like, ‘No, I'll make a new track.’ I just recorded it over a couple of evenings in the recording studio; it was just me by myself, this one. It’s literally a demo in the sense that it's something that was done over a seven-hour period, three hours one evening and four hours the next evening. The feeling was there.” glider “We got a proper sampler, we got an Akai sampler. That was in 1989, and it was the first time we really used a sampler as opposed to using it a bit. This track was made up of mostly guitar samples and mostly guitar feedback; I was just recording the feedback and then we’d narrow it down to one bit. We didn’t even know how to plug the sampler into a keyboard at that point—it just had a button on the side that you’d press to trigger it, and that’s what we used.”